When the room is full of Deputy Principals, not teachers

Teachers are one audience. School leaders are another, and they’re a harder room. They’ve sat through a lot of professional development. They can smell theory from the back row, and they’re protective of their time.

I ran a hands-on session, “AI Bots for School Leaders,” for serving Deputy Principals at a leadership conference in New South Wales. Not a talk about AI, but a working session where leaders built something useful for their own jobs.

What landed

What worked wasn’t the technology. It was pitching it at their actual workload, the decisions, the consistency, the time. One leader put it this way: “Such a great session to gain some understanding of how our jobs can be made easier, and in ways that ensures consistency and that we aren’t missing things when making decisions in our time poor jobs.” Several left having built a working AI bot in the session itself.

The recommendations

Asked what they’d tell a colleague considering the training, the responses were unanimous:

“I would recommend it for all settings and roles.” · “I would highly recommend this training.” · “Get on board.” · “Do it.”

These are Deputy Principals, the people who decide whether a school takes something on. When that room recommends a session to its peers without hesitation, it tells you the approach travels, from teachers all the way up to the leaders carrying the strategic call.

One tactical idea a week on AI in schools: the Littlejohns Letter.